A question that sometimes gets raised in BDSM contexts is: Is BDSM a “sexual orientation”? I’ve spent rather a lot of time thinking about this, and at this point, I believe the answer depends largely on the individual — yet at the same time, the answer stands a strong chance of being politicized into something that could limit individuals. And that scares me.

But I’m getting ahead of myself already.

I remember the first moment it occurred to me to consider BDSM an orientation — the first time I used that word. I believe I was writing up my coming-out story at the time; I was discussing the way I freaked out when I came into BDSM, and I wrote: “In retrospect, it seems surreal that I reacted so badly to my BDSM orientation.”

I remember that I felt vaguely electrified at what I was saying, a little scared … but also comforted. I hadn’t had much contact with other sex theorists at the time and I thought I was saying something radical, maybe too radical to be taken seriously. Since our culture mostly discusses the idea of “orientation” in regards to gay/lesbian/bi/transgender, it seemed to me that — if I dared refer to it as “my BDSM orientation” — then a comparison with LGBT was implied in my statement.

Would the world believe that my BDSM desires could be as “real”, as “deep-rooted”, as “unavoidable” as the sexual orientation of a gay/lesbian/bi/transgender person? Would I offend GLBT people by implying that my sexual needs are as “real”, “deep-rooted” and “unavoidable” as theirs … by implying that my sexual needs are anything like theirs?

Still, as crazy as the concept seemed at the time, it also felt right. When I looked back at my memories and previous actions, it was quite obvious that I have always had these needs, desires and fantasies. Acknowledging this, and applying the word “orientation” to BDSM, helped me come to terms with my BDSM identity. It cleared a mental path for me to think of BDSM as a inbuilt part of myself — like my bone structure or eye color. BDSM became something to accept … come to terms with … even embrace. It was a hugely liberating way of thinking about it: if I thought of BDSM was an orientation, that meant I didn’t have to worry about or fight it anymore.

Since then, I’ve been so buried in sexuality theory and I’ve talked to so many BDSM people that — well, now the idea of a “BDSM orientation” seems kinda old hat. I am reminded that it’s a radical concept only when I talk to people who don’t think about these things all the time. I think that the idea of BDSM as an orientation occurs naturally to people who think a lot about BDSM sexuality, because so many kinksters either know we’re BDSM people all along, or instantly recognize BDSM once we find it. A recent article about a potentially groundbreaking new BDSM-related legal case quoted sexologist Charles Moser at the end, as he very eloquently describes how BDSM can be considered a sexual orientation:

When I talk to someone who is identifying as BDSM and ask them have you always felt this way, and they almost always report that ‘This has been the way I was all along. I didn’t realize it. I thought I was interested in more traditional male/female relationships but now I realize that I really like the power and control aspects of relationship.

… They are very clear often that, ‘my relationships which were vanilla were not fulfilling. I always felt like there was something missing. Now that I’m doing BDSM, I am fulfilled. This feels really right to me. This really gets me to my core. It’s who I am.’

… And so in the same way as someone who is homosexual, they couldn’t really change — they somehow felt fulfilled in the same-sex relationship — similarly in a BDSM relationship or scenario, they similarly feel the same factors, and in my mind, that allows me to classify people who fit that as a sexual orientation. I cannot change someone who’s into BDSM to not be BDSM.

That’s how I feel. Absolutely.

And yet … I disagree with Moser on one key point: not all BDSM people are like this. I know that there do exist people who do BDSM, who don’t feel it the same way I do — who don’t feel that it’s been with them all along. It’s not deep-rooted for them. It’s not unavoidable, it’s not necessary, it doesn’t go to their core. They can change from being into BDSM to not doing BDSM, because it’s not built-in; it’s just something they do sometimes, for fun. And that’s totally okay with me — I will always say that I’ve got no problem with whatever people want to do, as long as it’s kept among consenting adults.

But what does the existence of people like that mean for BDSM as an orientation? Are they somehow less “entitled” to practice BDSM, because it’s not as deep-rooted or important to them as it is for, say, me? No, that can’t be true. I’m not going to claim that my feelings are “more real” than theirs, or somehow more important, just because BDSM goes straight to my core but not to theirs. They’ve got as much right as I do to practice these activities, as long as they do it consensually.

So, where does that leave us? It means that BDSM is an orientation for some people, but not for others. I’m fine with that. Does that mean we’re done here? Well, no ….

… because if BDSM is an orientation for some people but not others, then we’re in a bit of a weird place when it comes to legal recognition. In the case I cited above, Charles Moser is claiming that we BDSMers can’t change ourselves and that therefore, we don’t deserve to be stigmatized for our sexuality.

On the surface, this might seem reasonable … but when you start analyzing it, it’s deeply problematic. Because, actually, whether or not people can alter their sexual needs, there’s no reason people shouldn’t be able to do what they want with other consenting adults. If any of us phrase the argument as: “I can’t change myself, so please don’t hate me!” then we are implicitly saying, “If I could change myself, I would — but I can’t, so please have pity on me!” In other words, we are implicitly saying: “BDSMers can’t ‘fix’ our sexual needs — it’s not ‘our fault’ — so please don’t hate us.”

And when we say that, we are accepting and validating the way our culture tries to shame our sexuality. We are fundamentally agreeing with the opposition and begging for an exception … rather than trying to change the rule. We are calling BDSM a “fault” … rather than stating that freely exercising sexuality is our “right”. We are casting BDSM sexuality as something that we would “fix” if we could.

Also, using the orientation argument leaves the entire segment of the population that doesn’t feel BDSM as an orientation standing out in the cold. If we go with the orientation model, and say that it’s okay for BDSM-identified people to practice BDSM only because we feel it as a deep-rooted orientation … then we are implying that it’s not okay for people to practice BDSM if they don’t feel it as a deep-rooted orientation.

(Something like this has happened in some gay/lesbian communities: people who have sex with folks of the same gender, but don’t identify as strictly gay or lesbian, have sometimes been stigmatized within gay/lesbian communities or even disallowed from gay/lesbian gatherings. I understand that there are historical reasons that kind of thing happened, and analyzing the phenomenon would take up a whole post. I’m pretty sure books have been written about it. But the point is that when it did happen, it left bisexual people — as well as others who don’t fit neatly within the “gay/lesbian orientation” — out in the cold. And I don’t want to support that with BDSM.)

This is why I find myself moving away from that kind of language. I think it is important to move away from “I can’t help having these needs,” and towards “It’s fundamentally unimportant whether we can change our sexual desires; the only really important thing is whether or not we practice them consensually.”

… But …

… there’s always a but …

I’ll admit that I feel anxiety about abandoning the “orientation model”. I still haven’t taken the word “orientation” out of my BDSM overview lecture, because it is useful for convincing people that BDSM is okay. Because so many people, at this point, have accepted the LGBTQ orientation as something that should not be stigmatized — the word “orientation” can really help them understand what BDSM means to us and why it’s not okay to stigmatize that, either.

Furthermore, there are obviously people out there (like Charles Moser) who are seeking to protect BDSM legally, as a sexual orientation — seeking to make BDSM a protected class, so that we can’t get fired or have our kids taken away or suffer other consequences for being into BDSM anymore. If talking about BDSM as a sexual orientation means I no longer have to worry about those consequences, then is it worth it? Maybe.

And, of course, I don’t want to forget how much the idea of an “orientation” comforted me when I was first coming into BDSM. It made me feel so much better to recognize BDSM as an inbuilt part of myself. I don’t want to take that comfort away from anyone else.

So, when I try to campaign for general sexual freedom and acceptance — “orientation” or no “orientation” — I imagine that I’ll still end up using the word sometimes. But I’ll always try to be conscious of it, and I’ll always try to speak in ways that support this statement:

“It’s fundamentally unimportant whether we can change our sexual desires; the only really important thing is whether or not we practice them consensually.”

27 responses to “BDSM as a sexual orientation, and complications of the orientation model”

Why can’t it be both a behavior and an orientation? Because some people *do* start and stop their SM activity in the same way one might treat a particular sexual act. Others (like, oh, me) never had a sexual thought without an SM component. As Califia once wrote many years ago, I’d rather be left on a deserted island with a kinky man than a vanilla lesbian; SM trumps gender identity and my otherwise primary orientation to other girls.

The trouble with the idea that when something is immutable, it should therefore be protected from bias is that there are some states which do not meet that criteria. I was raised in one religion, and later on converted to another. Religion is most certainly not an immutable state, yet we feel very good about guaranteeing protected status for it.

So, fine – if someone chooses to do SM for ten years and then stops, they might as well have become a non-practicing member of the class, or they might have converted to vanilla. Whereas those who feel they were born with SM encoded in their genes can be covered under the same umbrella that covers queers who feel *they* were born that way.

I wish more people would write and think this way about sexual orientation in the “traditional” LGBT sense, actually. I think that for most people it’s not a choice, yes, but I also think that some people are able to choose who they sleep with and when. Bisexual people, especially those who are in monogamous relationships, really get marginalized by the more mainstream views that orientation is so concrete. I think it’s great to be able to see both BDSM and gender/sex orientation as BOTH an orientation and a preference.

Well, I consider my personal kinks orientational insofar as power, dominance and SM fantasies have been with me as far as I can think back. Pretty much zilch related input on the “nurture” side of things. If it weren’t innate in me, I have no clue where it would have come from.

But if BDSM were something we just tried, say, out of curiosity, and realised we like it for now, I don’t see how that would make a difference. People who try out something and like it have exactly the same rights as people who would call their kinks an orientation. It wouldn’t alter the basic human right to engage in our consensual sexual activities as we choose to do, and not be discriminated against because of them.

@Laura — I really like the comparison to religion. That’s smart. I think you’re right — saying that we can only get legal protection if we claim that our desires are immutable is setting up a false dichotomy. What I am wondering now is how to make this case to others. When we already have people out there like Charles Moser who are working to get BDSM legally accepted as an orientation, should we be asking those people to change their tactics? To change their vocabulary? To change their entire approach?

@Paradox — I agree … this is part of what really excites me about the queer movement. I want to make sure that BDSM never needs its own queer movement, if that makes any sense.

@Ranai — Exactly. The question I’m trying to articulate is less about whether it’s an orientation or not — because I agree that it doesn’t matter — and more, “How does that affect the way we discuss it, the words we use, our approach to legal acceptance?”

Don’t you think that BDSM is just another spoke on the wheel of human sexuality, not really an “orientation”. We could be more than one spoke of that wheel at any time in our lives because of biology or environment. I feel that homosexuality fits into this theory quite nicely also. Everyone’s sexuality depends on nature and nurture so there is a continuous spectrum where individuals determine sexuality rather than large generalized groups.

[…] be considered a type of sexual orientation is a whole different discussion, which can be read about here. But I know for me personally, I feel like it has been a big part of my sexuality ever since I […]

[…] in our “Best of the kinky rest” pantheon comes from the desk of Clarisse Thorn, who is considering the issue of whether BDSM can be referred to as a sexual orientation in the same breath as being LGBT, and […]

I’m sure you’ve encountered it, but Ivo Dominguez Jr. has a fabulous little book called Beneath the Skins in which he posits “polysexuality”: that sexuality is made up of many different orientations, each changeable in relation to all the others. It’s really helped me understand my own sexuality which is very much something I’ve always had, and, like @Laura (#1), “SM trumps gender” for me every time. I agree with @Laura’s comparison with religion, or even military service: something we choose that should definitely still be protected, whether or not it’s “immutably” part of us.

Thanks for your amazing writing. I’ve been bopping around your blog a bit this evening. It feels like coming home.

Hey, I’m coming late to this, but I wanted to thank you for your comments on choice. I have believed for a long time that choice is a component of what determines your sexual orientation or at the very least that your sexual orientation is not immutable. Yet, bringing that up has often resulted in my being labeled homophobic or at the very least “playing into the hands” of homophobes. I have always found that very confusing because in my mind whether sexual orientation is a choice or not is simply an empirical question which has no bearing on whether specific sexual orientations should be accepted or not. I often made it a point to ask activists I spoke to: “If being gay was a choice. Would that make it acceptable to discriminate against gays?” and I never got an answer to my question only accusations or denegations of my hypothetical premise. Reading this feels good because as someone who has always leaned towards kink, I really don’t want to have to demonstrate that I don’t have a choice in order to have my sexuality accepted. Choice is a beautiful thing and I would much prefer to have my choice accepted because it is my choice than have my preference tolerated because it is something over which I have no power.

Thanks Alex. Yeah, I agree that the current discourse on the topic is really toxic and problematic. I’m always scared that I’m going to end up getting attacked as opposing sexual freedom because I think sexuality is a bit more fluid that pop culture currently sees it. But I just want sexual freedom to be based on something accurate!

Transgender isn’t an orientation. It is a gender identity. There is a massive difference. I feel that calling S&M an orientation is taking the “sexual” word in “sexual orientation” too heavily – as though I’m a lesbian because I like tits. It gets so tiring to have my orientation reduced to that and it’s been decades and decades of attempting to convince those who have taken my rights away that it is not in fact all about sex.

For the S&M crowd to appropriate the term “sexual orientation” is to display an incomplete, arrogant, and frankly bigoted understanding of the term. People who are into S&M aren’t the only ones with innate preferences. Some lesbians prefer butch women and always have, some prefer tall women, some short, femme women, some androgynous women. We are all lesbians. As long as I can remember, I’ve been seriously turned on by lipstick and the idea of having it all over me. That is not my orientation. That is my taste. S&M is your taste. If you want to make it into a lifestyle, that’s your choice, but this is as ignorant as saying you’re of the “Catholic race” or the “submissive gender.” Frankly, your privilege is showing.

Frankly, I think your vanilla privilege is showing. You sound very ignorant of the realities of BDSMers’ lives, feelings and realities.

You want to equate BDSM desires as equivalent to preferring a taller or shorter partner, and that is just flat-out WRONG in my experience of my sexual identity.

What, in your opinion, is the distinction between a “taste” and an “orientation”? Is it a difference in degree (that is, a “taste” is somehow less compelling than an “orientation”), or is it a difference in kind (if so, what is the basis for that difference)?

I identify as bi, with a strong preference for female partners over male. However, trumping that is my preference for a Submissive partner. If my partner is submitting and letting me do my sadism and bondage and Dominance on them then hir gender is really of much smaller concern to me. As noted above, I tend to prefer women as my partners but for me, that is closer to a “taste” for taller or shorter partners, than it is to an “orientation”.

You say, “It gets so tiring to have my orientation reduced to that and it’s been decades and decades of attempting to convince those who have taken my rights away that it is not in fact all about sex.” But now you are doing exactly the same thing to me: you are trying to reduce my orientation to “just sex”, and that is not acceptable to me. It is not true of me. Your vanilla privilege is showing.

I’ll be honest, I have doubts about the “orientation” model, but it comes the closest to describing how I feel and experience my sexuality as a sadist and a Dominant. I don’t know if it is prenatal or postnatal in its origins, I don’t know whether there is some life experience when I was young that turned me this way, or if I was born like it, or if it was just my weird destiny planned out by God above, for His/Her/Its/Their grand Purpose. It really doesn’t matter to me what the reason for it is. I am the way I am, and it is NOT a “taste” or a “preference”.

[…] idea that ’acceptable’ sexuality is ‘built-in’, or ‘innate’. Some BDSMers consider BDSM an ‘orientation’ — and I, myself, once found that thinking of BDSM as an orientation was extremely helpful in […]

[…] of activities including bondage and domination, sadism and masochism, domination and submission) is a sexual orientation. This may seem strange at first, especially if you’re used to hearing that being gay or […]

I’d just like to reiterate #11’s point that didn’t get addressed–transgender is not a sexual orientation, it is a gender identity. Those are clearly two very different things, and I find it upsetting that you confuse them. Trans folks are attracted to all different kinds of people. Or are you saying a transgender sexual orientation is someone who is only attracted to trans people, be they men or women? I personally find the categorization a bit offensive & would love a response, Clarisse. Not trying to be nitpicky or derail from the main point (which I find interesting, compelling, and well-written!), but I am curious about this aspect.

Seemed to me like trans* wasn’t being defined as a sexual orientation, but being referenced as an identity in regard to which questions of sexual orientation often come up. (And often harsh ones, e.g., “If you’re really a trans man, why are you attracted to men? Doesn’t that mean that you should have stayed a woman in the first place?”)

That said, though… the fact that those kinds of questions and objections come up might be one of the reasons why it came off as classifying trans* as a sexual orientation in the first place.

[…] privilege is tied to vanilla privilege if I think of my submissiveness as an orientation (which may be messy, but for me it works) I don’t qualify for a lot of straight privilege, especially in my […]

Thank you so much for this, my lovely boyfriend and switch partner was introduced by an ex and given that he is also my first sexual partner could not understand how I already knew I was into BDSM… my attempts at explaining that I have known since early childhood and, like another commenter, consider it a stronger orientation than my sexuality (I am straight but would rather be with a kinky woman than a vanilla man), just confused him further :P

My tuppence is that it can be both innate and just tried it, liked it in different people… I know we’re not a big sample size but that’s certainly how me and my partner have turned out

[…] hate me!” implies that, if you could change yourself, you would. As Clarisse Thorn eloquently observes: “…when we say that, we are accepting and validating the way our culture tries to shame our […]

[…] story in support of the idea that BDSM is not always something chosen, in support of the idea that BDSM is a sexual orientation that possibly has some genetic roots to many of the people who like/practice […]

About Clarisse

On the other hand, I also wrote a different book about the subculture of men who trade tips on how to seduce and manipulate women:

I give great lectures on my favorite topics. I've spoken at a huge variety of places — academic institutions like the University of Chicago; new media conventions like South By Southwest; museums like the Museum of Sex; and lots of others.

I established myself by creating this blog. I don't update the blog much anymore, but you can still read my archives. My best writing is available in my books, anyway.

I've lived in Swaziland, Greece, Chicago, and a lot of other places. I've worked in game design, public health, and bookstores. Now I live in San Francisco, and I make my living with content strategy and user research.